Hong Kong on Track for Record Illegal Ivory Haul

Customs officers stand behind more than 500 pieces of ivory tusks that were seized in Hong Kong in a photo taken on November 16, 2012.

As demand for ivory booms across the border in China, Hong Kong is on track to record its heftiest annual haul of seized elephant ivory in recent history.

Hong Kong customs officials seized 4.6 tons of ivory in the first 10 months of 2012, up nearly 25% from a year earlier, a government spokesman said. This year’s tally got a boost from a massive seizure made in late October, in which smugglers tried to camouflage the tusks, which were shipped from Kenya and Tanzania, by hiding them amid plastic scraps and beans. Officials also seized an additional 1.4 tons last month, in a shipment that contained 569 tusks covered by a cascade of sunflower seeds.

Worldwide, 2011 was the biggest year on record for elephant ivory seizures, and this year could be worse, says Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia Regional Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, citing examples such as a mass elephant poaching in Cameroon earlier this year that left some 500 elephants slaughtered.

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“It’s a hugely worrying situation,” says Tom Milliken, who manages the Elephant Trade Information System, which was created by signatories to the Convention on International trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora to monitor the illegal trade. “All indicators for Africa are very discouraging for elephants.”

Much of this poaching is fueled by Chinese consumer demand. Mr. Milliken said China now accounts for about 40% of the illegal trade, up from about 3% to 4% in the late 1990s.

In 2011, there were 60 ivory seizures recorded in Hong Kong, up from 28 in 2008. So far this year, there have been 44. The Hong Kong government said it is working to collaborate with mainland authorities to stop the trade—for example, the tip-off for year’s biggest bust came from Guangdong. The rise in seizures doesn’t reflect any change in the trade, it added.

But on the ground, wildlife monitoring groups say the changes in the trade’s volume are obvious, and that elephant populations are increasingly feeling the impact of Chinese demand.

“Even those countries that have what they say are healthy elephant populations are now experiencing increasing problems with their poaching,” said Mary Rice of the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency.

A decade ago, there were 60,000 elephants in Tanzania’s Selous National Park, which is supposed to be home to the country’s largest elephant population, Ms. Rice says. She says that that number has rapidly fallen.

“I was there in October and we struggled to find elephants. There are tourists who’ve been to the area recently and left without seeing a single elephant,” she says.

To defend elephants, many countries have armed teams of rangers tasked with protecting their elephant herds. However, modern poachers carry an array of weapons ranging from AK47s to M16s to rocket-propelled grenades, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s James Isiche, who is based in Kenya. So far this year in Kenya alone, he says, four rangers have been killed in fighting with poachers.

Stopping the elephant trade, Ms. Gabriel says, will ultimately require dealing with ivory consumers, not just poachers. Surveys conducted by IFAW suggest 70% of Chinese consumers don’t understand that ivory comes from dead elephants, says Ms. Gabriel, and many think elephants are capable of re-growing their tusks. More Chinese-language education about the costs of the trade is needed to help quell demand, she says.

“Just trying to deal with the poaching on its own is not going to have any real impact beyond the immediate area,” says Ms. Rice. “If you’re successful with antipoaching in one area, they’ll just move somewhere else. Unless you’re dealing with demand, you’re not dealing with the problem.”

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